Rob Weidner is a gimbal/Movi Pro camera operator based in Cape Town, South Africa who enjoys empowering others with his creativity and optimism. Aside from that, he can also make a mean pizza and is ready to travel the world with his kit.

Two years ago, my father was faced with the decision of purchasing a new car and being a driver of some of the best consumer-performance vehicles on the market with BMWs, Jaguars, and Audis; it only made sense to keep the car search headed in that direction. While having to keep the possibility of long road trips, the winter snow storms, and typical day-to-day driving habits in mind, the idea of getting a Tesla Model S was not on his mind. After much convincing just to get him to test drive one, the battle was over, and he was sold. Since then, he has upgraded his Model S already to the new generation that allows for the autosteer technology and all-wheel drive capabilities. My fascination with Elon Musk was only solidified at that point, as an avid user of PayPal. The Musk name was also intriguing because of my love of South Africa, and the role of South Africans in the business world.

I had to think, Okay, what are the things that affect how a team functions. The first obvious assumption would be that other people will behave like you. But that’s not true. Even if they would like to behave like you, they don’t necessarily have all the assumptions or information that you have in your mind. -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 1205-7

This left Musk searching for an industry that had tons of money and inefficiencies that he and the Internet could exploit. Musk began thinking back to his time as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia. His big takeaway from that job, that bankers are rich and dumb, now had the feel of a massive opportunity. -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 1225-28

It had taken Musk less than a decade to go from being a Canadian backpacker to becoming a multimillionaire at the age of twenty-seven. With his $22 million, he moved from sharing an apartment with three roommates to buying an 1,800-square-foot condo and renovating it. He also bought a $1 million McLaren F1 sports car and a small prop plane and learned to fly. -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 1266-69

Justine had given birth to a son—Nevada Alexander Musk. He was ten weeks old when, just as the eBay deal was announced, he died. The Musks had tucked Nevada in for a nap and placed the boy on his back as parents are taught to do. When they returned to check on him, he was no longer breathing and had suffered from what the doctors would term a sudden infant death syndrome–related incident. -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 1796-99

A friend of his worked for the phone company and drew a diagram that demonstrated a way to squeeze a networking cable safely between the electricity, cable, and phone wires on a telephone pole. At 2 A.M., an off-the-books crew showed up with a cherry picker and ran fiber to the telephone poles and then ran cables straight to the SpaceX buildings. “We did that over a weekend instead of taking months to get permits,” -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 2001-4

Straubel concluded that majoring in physics would not be for him. The advanced courses were too theoretical, and Straubel liked to get his hands dirty. He developed his own major called energy systems and engineering. “I wanted to take software and electricity and use it to control energy,” -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 2278-80

Musk feared that VantagePoint would oust him as CEO, recapitalize Tesla, and emerge as the major owner of the carmaker. It could then sell Tesla to a Detroit automaker or focus on selling electric drivetrains and battery packs instead of making cars. Such reasoning would have been quite practical from a business standpoint but did not match up with Musk’s goals for Tesla. -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 3152-55

Within SpaceX, Blue Origin is mockingly referred to as BO and at one point the company created an e-mail filter to detect messages with “blue” and “origin” to block the poaching. The relationship between Musk and Bezos has soured, and they no longer chat about their shared ambition of getting to Mars. -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 3407-9

During one incident in particular, a part made it all the way to the test stand with a major flaw—described by one engineer as the equivalent of a coffee cup not having a bottom—instead of being caught at the factory. According to observers, Bowersox argued that SpaceX should go back and investigate the process that led to the mistake and fix its root cause. Musk had already decided that he knew the basis of the problem and dismissed Bowersox after a couple of years on the job. -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 3601-4

SpaceX has never had any interest in doing the five-minute tourist flights to low Earth orbit like Virgin Galactic and XCOR. It does, however, have the ability to carry researchers to orbiting habitats being built by Bigelow Aerospace and to orbiting science labs being constructed by various countries. -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 3678-80

And most mind-boggling of all, Musk revealed that the Dragon 2 will be able to land anywhere on Earth that SpaceX wants by using the SuperDraco engines and thrusters to come to a gentle stop on the ground. No more landings at sea. No more throwing spaceships away. “That is how a twenty-first-century spaceship should land,” -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 3807-10

To find the right size for the screen, Musk and von Holzhausen would sit in the skeleton car and hold up laptops of different sizes, placing them horizontally and vertically to see what looked best. They settled on a seventeen-inch screen in a vertical position. Drivers would tap on this screen for every task except for opening the glove box and turning on the emergency lights—jobs required by law to be performed with physical buttons. -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 4114-17

Given Tesla’s value at the time, it was thought that Google would need to pay about $6 billion for the company. As Musk, Page, and Google’s lawyers debated the parameters of an acquisition, a miracle happened. The five hundred or so people whom Musk had turned into car salesmen quickly sold a huge volume of cars. -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 4461-64

Musk paid $1 million for the Lotus Esprit that Roger Moore drove underwater in The Spy Who Loved Me and wants to prove that such a vehicle can be done. “Maybe we’ll make two or three, but it wouldn’t be more than that,” Musk told the Independent newspaper. “I think the market for submarine cars is quite small.” -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 4722-24

Some of the conversations between Musk and Page take place at a secret apartment Google owns in downtown Palo Alto. It’s inside of one of the taller buildings in the area and offers views of the mountains surrounding the Stanford University campus. Page and Brin will take private meetings at the apartment and have their own chef on call to prepare food for guests. -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 5105-8

“It’s kind of our recreation, I guess,” said Page. 23 “It’s fun for the three of us to talk about kind of crazy things, and we find stuff that eventually turns out to be real. We go through hundreds or thousands of possible things before arriving at the ones that are most promising.” -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 5113-15

The reason it worked was because the cost of transactions in PayPal was lower than any other system. And the reason the cost of transactions was lower is because we were able to do an increasing percentage of our transactions as ACH, or automated clearinghouse, electronic transactions, and most importantly, internal transactions. -- Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, loc. 5325-28